SENECA FALLS, N.Y. — Seneca Falls is a sleepy little town with a quaint downtown of old buildings, and the typical economic struggles of declining industry and stagnant population, nestled in the beauty of northwestern New York.

It’s hard to picture it as a hotbed of revolt, but Seneca Falls — the falls were obliterated when locks were put on the river — is a touchstone for anyone interested in the women’s rights movement.

It was the site of the first women’s rights convention, the home of key women’s rights agitator Elizabeth Cady Stanton for 16 years, and the town where Mrs. Stanton met Susan B. Anthony.

New York percolated with the abolitionist and temperance movements — there was overlap in personnel of the two movements — so the ground was plowed for a seed to be planted for women’s rights.

But it took the moving to the Locust Hill section of town of Mrs. Stanton, her husband, Henry B., and their three children — four others were born while they lived there — in 1847 to make the seed sprout.

The Stantons had lived in Boston, where Mrs. Stanton enjoyed the intellectual fruits of hearing, meeting and observing leading lights in literature, theology, law, music, theater and social concerns, including temperance, prison reform, abolition and peace.

“I had never lived in such an enthusiastically literary and reform latitude before, and my mental powers were kept at the highest tension,” Mrs. Stanton said in her autobiography, “Eighty Years and More.”

The daughter of a judge, Mrs. Stanton’s mind was sharpened by listening to her father discuss cases with clients, and debating him and his students and colleagues on legal issues, particularly concerning the strangulating laws that pertained to women.

She also developed a strict work ethic, based on her goal of proving to her father that he should be as proud of her as he would be of any son. It was a goal she never reached.

In her autobiography, Mrs. Stanton recalled that, at age 11, the last of her four brothers died. This occurred at a time when all of a family’s hopes and expectations rested on their sons. Women could not vote, could not own property after they married, had few occupational options, and were not even allowed to speak in public. A woman’s role was to get married, bear children, run the house, and be subject to her husband’s rule.

On a day shortly after the boy died — he had not even been buried yet — Judge Daniel Cady said, “Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a boy.”

Mrs. Stanton said she told her father, “I will try to be all my brother was,” and she strove to develop herself in what were considered boy’s pursuits — learning and horsemanship.

Judge Cady never accepted his daughter’s goals, but the work ethic and desire to change the world had stuck in her.

In addition to her intellectual fulfillment in Boston, Mrs. Stanton was blessed with good servants. With able help, she enjoyed cleaning clothes, managing expenses, choosing her children’s clothes and setting the table for meals. She considered her domestic chores to be a creative outlet.

While she returned to New York — the state of her birth and pre-married life — to lobby for a married woman’s property bill, her life in Boston was “rich,” said Miriam Gurko in “The Ladies of Seneca Falls.”

“The disadvantages of being a woman did not in any way press in on her,” Ms. Gurko said. But, alas, it had to end. Stanton’s health was “delicate,” Mrs. Stanton said, and the Boston winters were “too severe for him.”

“We left Boston, with many regrets, and sought a more genial climate in central New York.”

The house the Stantons moved into — her father owned it — remains, changed somewhat over the years, on the outskirts of town. It’s a modest house, no great architectural marvel. The National Park Service owns the property and gives tours of the house, which is not furnished.

Luckily, we had a great tour guide on a June visit who was able to bring alive the Stanton family as the parents schooled their children in legal debate and intellectual pursuit.

The house stands on a five-acre plot, almost next to the Seneca River, which was farther away in the days before the lock was installed.

It was in the river that Mrs. Stanton’s son, Henry, placed his 18-month-old brother in a “life preserver of corks” as an experiment, Mrs. Stanton said.

“He was as blue as indigo and as cold as a frog when rescued by his anxious mother,” she said.

The chimney of the house became a perch for the baby the next day, again, courtesy of Henry. Aside from her sons’ adventures, “In Seneca Falls my life was comparatively solitary, and the change from Boston was somewhat depressing,” Mrs. Stanton said. “There, all my immediate friends were reformers, I had near neighbors, a new home with all the modern conveniences, and well-trained servants. Here our residence was on the outskirts of the town, roads very often muddy and no sidewalks most of the way, Mr. Stanton was frequently from home, I had poor servants and an increasing number of children.”

“The novelty of housekeeping had passed away” and “the company I needed for intellectual stimulus was a trial rather than a pleasure,” she said.

On top of all that, her children and servants contracted malaria.

“Cleanliness, order, the love of the beautiful and artistic, all faded away in the struggle to accomplish what was absolutely necessary from hour to hour,” Mrs. Stanton said.

Mrs. Stanton had developed the “healthy discontent” that informed Emerson’s comment, “A healthy discontent is the first step to progress.” All of her intellectual complaints against a woman’s lot in life were now ones of practical experience. She had argued with her father about the laws that kept women prisoners of their families and husbands, and recalled the humiliation she felt in having attended the World Anti-slavery Convention in London in 1840, where women were refused permission to speak and banished to a platform to watch the men.

Amid this discontent, Mrs. Stanton was invited to visit with Lucretia Mott in nearby Waterloo. Mrs. Mott was a Quaker, abolitionist and general reformer of great reputation. The two had met at the anti-slavery convention and had pledged to hold a women’s rights convention once they returned to the States.

Their reaquaintance sparked a meeting that led to that long-desired convention. The organizers, including Mary Ann McClintock of Waterloo, whose home is now owned by the park service, drafted a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. Largely written by Mrs. Stanton and based on the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions stated “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”

The two-day convention was planned in a matter of days, although not without debate by the planners. One of the key sticking points was a demand for suffrage. Stanton, who otherwise supported his wife’s desire for more rights for women, called a demand for women’s suffrage “preposterous,” and left town.

Even Mrs. Mott, who was advertised to be the star of the convention, initially balked at a suffrage demand.

“Oh, Lizzie, thou will make us ridiculous,” Mrs. Mott said.

She encouraged going slow, but Mrs. Stanton persisted, as she usually did, no matter how controversial an idea might be.

The convention commenced on July 19, 1848, in the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, with townspeople and reformers such as the abolitionist Frederick Douglas of Rochester, who was only 10 years removed from slavery, in attendance.

The ruins of the chapel — two brick walls — remain, but are the focus of the Women’s National Rights Park in Seneca Falls. On the second day of the convention, the sentiments were passed, although the one calling for suffrage gave as much grief as it had among the organizers.

Mrs. Stanton dedicates all of two sentences to the convention in her autobiography, calling it a “grand success.”

The convention might have been a footnote, relegated to two sentences in some over-long history tome, if not for the response to it by those who did not attend.

“Most newspaper editors were so infuriated by the convention that they gave it the kind of publicity that ladies could never have managed, or even thought of arranging, for themselves,” Ms. Gurko said.

“All the journals from Maine to Texas seemed to strive with each other to see which could make our movement appear the most ridiculous,” Mrs. Stanton said.

The convention set something in motion. Another convention was planned in Rochester, and others followed in other states.

One person of note who was not there was Susan B. Anthony of Rochester. Although a school teacher and temperance worker with an interest in abolitionism, Miss Anthony was “startled and amused” by the “novelty and presumption” of the demands that came from the Seneca Falls convention, Mrs. Stanton said.

However, Miss Anthony’s parents and sister attended the Rochester convention and concluded the demands were “proper and reasonable,” Mrs. Stanton said.

Her mind now churning with thoughts of women’s rights, Miss Anthony did not meet Mrs. Stanton until nearly three years later, in the spring of 1851. She was in Seneca Falls to attend antislavery meetings called for by George Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison.

One night, after a meeting, Mrs. Stanton, Thompson and Garrison — the two men were staying at Mrs. Stanton’s house — were walking home.

“We met Mrs. (Amelia) Bloomer — she of the “bloomers” attire — and Miss Anthony on the corner of the street, waiting to meet us,” Mrs. Stanton said.

A bronze sculpture commemorating the meeting of Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony is on display in Seneca Falls.

“I liked her thoroughly, and why I did not at once invite her home with me to dinner, I do not know,” Mrs. Stanton said.

Although slighted that night, Miss Anthony became a regular visitor, even moving in for periods of time. When Mrs. Stanton’s domestic duties became overwhelming, Miss Anthony — Mrs. Stanton called her “my good angel” — stepped in to right the ship, quell the savages and free up Mrs. Stanton to concentrate on the cause, respond to the latest wrong and devise another agitation.

“It was ‘mid such exhilarating scenes that Miss Anthony and I wrote addresses for temperance, anti-slavery, educational and woman’s rights conventions,” Mrs. Stanton wrote. “Here we forged resolutions, protests, appeals, petitions, agricultural reports, and constitutional arguments; for we made it a matter of conscience to accept every invitation to speak on every question, in order to maintain woman’s rights to do so.”

The Stanton home became “the center of the rebellion,” Mrs. Stanton said.